The Annihilators

by Donald Hamilton

  “Is that what I’m doing?” She smiled faintly. “Anyway, Lupe said that he understood from Cortez that we honored the ancient people and their gods and their places of worship, particularly this sacred cave. Most particularly this cave. This cave was very important to us gringos, to our scientific work, was it not? We would seriously like to preserve it, would we not? So there might be an alternative to killing, if we could be trusted. He would like to show us something… He took us around and showed us.” She swallowed. “It was booby-trapped, Sam. That whole gallery was mined, loaded with explosives ready to be fired. If the government forces learned about the place and tried to take back their materiel, they’d be blown sky-high. And of course, when the charges went, all that ammunition and stuff would go, too; and those limestone caverns aren’t very solid. The explosion would almost certainly bring the whole thing down, the entire roof of the cave, obliterating the underground chamber and the cenote and destroying everything we’d found… We couldn’t bear to think of it, Sam. After all our work, after coming so close, to have it all wiped out before we could record it, study it… And of course there was the fact, the very minor fact, that if we didn’t come to an agreement with Lupe, he would undoubtedly have us killed.”

  “So you made a deal?”

  Frances nodded. “It was the only thing we could do. Of course it was really a very good deal for Lupe, as Cortez had pointed out to him. Killing us would have been risky, no matter how well the ‘accident’ was staged. It would have brought all kinds of government investigators snooping around. Having us simply keep our mouths shut and continue our work made everything look respectable. Lupe didn’t have to worry about somebody discovering the tracks of modern vehicles, for instance, in unexpected places in the jungle, because we had our own vehicles in there by then and everybody knew those foolish gringos were chopping trails, and snooping everywhere. Loco, muy loco.” She drew a long breath. “He couldn’t have asked for better camouflage for his secret weapons cache; and of course once we’d agreed, we were stuck with him and his damned revolution. We had to do everything possible to help him keep his secret. If it were discovered now, we’d be in terrible trouble for not having reported it earlier.” She grimaced. “I know you’re remembering the speech I made in Chicago about not offending the local authorities. It’s all right to laugh, Sam. I laugh myself, sometimes. But rather bitterly, and not very often.”

  I watched her closely. “I see. So that’s why you were willing to go so far to obey his orders, and to hell with pride and honor, if there still is such a thing in this dishonorable world.”

  “Yes, Sam,” she said, meeting my eyes very steadily. “That’s why. That’s the whole story. I knew you’d understand.”

  And she was lying again, at least to some extent. I knew those too-candid, too-honest, too-steady gray eyes by now. Well, I told myself grimly, if she ever told the truth, all the truth, she wouldn’t be my Frances and I’d miss her.

  “Understand?” I said. “Sure, I understand. So let’s talk about these calendar conjunctions. When is the next one due? Have you figured it out?”

  “Yes, of course.” She spoke quickly, obviously happy to change the subject. “But first there’s an interesting coincidence you should know about. Perhaps you could call it a confirmation. A totally different line of research seems to indicate that the Mayas, who came much later of course, believed that the decadent peoples of the world would be destroyed in their sins once every thirteen baktuns, a baktun being their longest measure of time. A tun was a year, a katun was twenty years, and a baktun was four hundred years. Thirteen baktuns works out to fifty-two hundred years. So according to them, Armageddon or Götterdämmerung or what have you, would come around cyclically every five thousand years and a little, sweeping the world clean for a fresh start. However, at the end of the thirteenth Great Cycle of the Long Count Calendar, the whole world and all creation would cease to exist, period.”

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess,” I said. “We’re in this thirteenth Great Cycle now.” When she nodded soberly, I asked, “And it ends when?”

  “If you follow the Thompson correlation, the year of total annihilation will be 2013 a.d.”

  I drew a long breath and took a sip of my cooling coffee. I cleared my throat. “And what do you and your husband come up with, working it out from your three-calendar business?”

  “We come up with almost the same length for the Great Cycle, well, actually a hair less than five thousand years. Close enough, considering that we’re still working from very rough preliminary data. And the Melmecs ran their chronology from a different base date from the one used by the Mayas, determined by Thompson—and I must say I would never stick my neck out as far as he did by trying to pinpoint it with such precision. Not within a single year. You’ve got to remember that all these calendars supposedly run back to dates almost contemporary with the dinosaurs. Those old priests played their religious calendar games with very large numbers, probably for astrological reasons, not historical ones. And we know the time intervals they used, all right, but the problem is trying to figure out the dates they started counting from. Like our calendar runs forward and backward from the birth of Christ. If we didn’t know exactly when the star shone over Bethlehem, and if it all took place tens of thousands of years ago, we’d have some trouble writing down an exact date for the Declaration of Independence, wouldn’t we?”

  I grinned briefly. “Okay, professor. That’s enough scientific background. When’s the end of the world going to be?”

  She licked her lips, unsmiling. “We give ourselves fifty years’ leeway. Well, twenty-five either way. In round numbers, according to the Melmec calendar, the world should be due for cleansing again—unlike the Mayas, they do not predict total cosmic annihilation, merely the end of existing civilizations—some time between 1980 and 2030.”

  After a little, I signaled the girl again, and she filled our cups again. I said, “I’m going to have the caffeine jitters.”

  Frances said, “I’ve really got to go and see that things are properly organized.”

  But she didn’t move, and I said, “So we’ve just come into the danger zone. The world has. If your theories mean anything. If your Melmecs actually knew something.”

  “Yes, Sam.”

  “But you don’t know what’s going to kill us, assuming that the curse, or whatever you want to call it, is still operative.”

  “No. But the answer is here, somewhere; and we have to find it while there’s still time to do something about it.”

  “Assuming something can be done.” I frowned thoughtfully. “Would you say it involved a weapon or something that can be used as a weapon?”

  “To destroy an entire civilization?” She shook her head dubiously. “I don’t know, Sam. The Mayas apparently thought the job would be done by earthquakes; but there’s no archaeological or geological evidence that it ever happened that way. There are no indications of seismic cataclysms coinciding with the Great Cycle; we’ve checked that out carefully. Nor can we find any suggestions of plagues or other diseases, although that would be harder to determine after thousands of years. Nor does the evidence to date indicate that the Melmecs expected to be wiped out by overwhelming enemy attacks; although of course these were all warlike peoples.” Frances frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t know about a weapon, but whatever it was, they expected it to be quick and thorough. Their wall paintings, their carvings, their records as far as we can decipher them, all indicate that the Great Court would be knee-deep in dead bodies on that final day. Nobody would be left alive except a few priests and priestesses sheltered underground—selected to keep the ancient knowledge alive—and a few peasants trembling in the more distant fields.”

  “I suppose Cortez is a descendant of those selected survivors,” I said. Frances nodded. I asked, “Have you published any of your findings yet?”

  She shook her head. “Not really. We wanted to wait until the… the problem here was solved. The Montan
o problem. If it ever is. Archie did make a speech at the Center for Mesoamerican Studies a few months ago that outlined the general nature of our discoveries…” She stopped and looked at me sharply. “Why did you ask that?”

  “Because there seem to be some gents snooping around who are sometimes employed by Moscow to investigate scientific rumors that could indicate discoveries with possible military applications. These boys aren’t the first team or even the second, just a freelance operator named Rutterfeld presumably working under contract with a couple of helpers, whose job in Costa Verde could be to determine if you’re picking up anything here that might be of practical military value.”

  She grimaced. “Oh, God, the commie menace rears its ugly head!”

  I said grimly, “If you dig up an ancient Melmec cosmic-death-ray machine, commies aren’t the only ones who’ll be snooping around. Hell, anything that kills lots of people interests lots of people. And the trouble is that those interested people, like the unpleasant trio I have in mind, often use some fairly crude methods to find things out. So keep your eyes open.” After a moment I went on: “You seem to’ve been in touch with Lupe Montano, or his people, all through this trip. How did they make contact with you?”

  “There does seem to be quite a bit of support for his revolution,” Frances said. “He’s got people working for him just about everywhere, particularly in the hotels… Oh, oh, here comes Ramiro to tell us we’re late and everybody’s waiting for us.”

  She started picking up her things, while I closed my camera case. The stocky guide had eschewed his formal white guide-suit for today’s expedition; he was wearing white sailcloth slacks and a blue knit sports shirt.

  “Do not hurry yourself, señora,” he said. “I merely wished to confirm our plans so I can tell the driver: You do wish to start at the Temple of the Jaguar today?”

  “Yes, let them get the impact of the Great Court first. We’ll spend this morning on that, and plan to pay it another visit the last day before we leave, to kind of pull it all together for them. Tomorrow we’ll pick up the minor temples around here and the big cenote and the Ball Court; by that time they should be ready to appreciate the Sacred Cave, those who aren’t afflicted with claustrophobia. Then we’ll spend a day looking over Labal, and maybe a couple of other outlying centers if there’s time, whenever you can round up enough Jeeps, to show them how big this ancient urban complex really was.” She gave him an odd sideways glance. “Did you sleep well, Ramiro?”

  He met her look with a meaningful one of his own. “After midnight I slept very well indeed, señora. It is always a relief to see the goods properly delivered, as you say in America.” He went on in a dry voice, deliberately mimicking the political jargon he’d been using on us: “As a loyal agent of my fine progressive government I must, of course, consider it regrettable that the patriotic forces of right and justice were not available to apprehend the anti-administration criminals before they could join forces to conspire further against the free people of Costa Verde.” He smiled thinly, looking at me. “I am glad you chose not to interfere, Señor Felton.”

  Watching him move away, I said, “So Ramiro Sanchez is one of Lupe’s people, too. The guy I wasn’t supposed to talk too loudly in front of yesterday because you were afraid, oh, so afraid, that he’d report my subversive utterances to the government!” I looked at Frances grimly. “One of these days you’re going to start trusting me, Dillman, and I’ll die of shock.”

  She smiled nicely. “If that’s the only thing that can kill you, Sam, you’ll live a long time.”

  15

  It was a long, hot, hardworking morning. I used the 24 mm wide-angle lens for the overall shots and the 70-140 mm zoom for the details; each lens on a separate camera body, of course. That gave me enough optical equipment hanging around my neck to look nice and professional and fool the people.

  Actually, I’m still a little uncomfortable with those zooms. They’re convenient, of course, letting you frame each shot—near or far—with a twist of the wrist; but the early ones had all the crisp definition of an operable cataract. This was a new one, and I’d checked it out and it had seemed sharp enough, but I still didn’t have the total faith in it that I had in my old-fashioned one-focal-length lenses. But you can’t play pro nowadays without at least one long, fat zoom lens on display.

  Whoever had laid out the tour—and I suspected Frances was largely responsible—had planned the approach for a maximum of drama. We hiked half a mile along a trail through the tangled jungle, single file, between odd overgrown rocky mounds that were pointed out to us as ruins that had not yet been excavated and perhaps never would be. Unless a certain site promised new information, Frances said, it was left untouched because the old friezes and bas-reliefs tended to deteriorate quite rapidly once they were exposed to air and rain and sunlight, unless they were carefully stabilized, an expensive and not always totally successful process.

  Then we scrambled up a steep slope and found the Great Court lying open before us, very impressive, table-flat and several football fields long. It was flanked by two massive temple-crowned pyramids. At the end of the long court the enormous bulk of the Great Pyramid loomed ominously, black against the sun. A ray of light shone directly through the temple at the top, the Temple of Death, apparently open from east to west.

  “As you can see,” Frances said after giving us time to catch our breaths and admire the view, “as you can see, this whole ceremonial area is a tremendous level platform raised about twenty feet above the jungle floor; the pyramids rise from that. When you climb them, please be careful. You’ll note that the steps themselves are quite narrow and the risers are quite high. The best method is to go up and down in a crabwise fashion. Anybody who’s subject to vertigo had better not try it. It’s a good deal steeper than it looks.”

  One of the lady schoolteachers, Pat Tolson, looked up at the shadowed temple silhouette surmounting the forbidding mass of the Great Pyramid. She asked, “Up there, isn’t that where they sacrificed the virgins by opening their chests with an obsidian knife and tearing their hearts out?”

  Frances said, “That sacrificial technique was more popular with the later Aztecs over in Mexico. However, the Melmecs did have their human sacrifices; you’ll see various methods illustrated in the temple decorations. But that particular death, as far as we can determine, was usually reserved for prisoners taken in war. Bones indicating female sacrifices have been found; but unfortunately after a few thousand years it’s a little hard to determine just how pure the lady was at the time of her death.”

  After that, as far as I was concerned, it was Pyramid Day; and as I started up the first one I realized that I’d never make an archaeologist. The damned thing had looked reasonably negotiable at a distance, but close up it loomed above me like the United Nations Building with a few inadequate notches in it. Each step, as Frances had indicated, while almost two feet high, wasn’t even wide enough to plant your shoe on properly… The simple fact is that I get dizzy, dammit. Vertigo, like the lady said. And not only do I not like places high in the air, I do not like them deep in the ground—and I still had a cave to look forward to. Scratch archaeology as a possible career alternative.

  Fortunately, the big camera bag gave me a good excuse to be clumsy and cautious about it, hauling myself up ignominiously on all fours, more or less, while Gloria Jean Putnam, for one, in her wide skirts, and heavy boots, bounced up and down the giant stairs like a frisky chamois; and Frances herself strolled casually about those murderous steps while explaining that the Melniec priests probably didn’t want their pyramids to be too easy for ordinary mortals to climb; there was also the theory that the pitch had been scientifically calculated so that a dead sacrificed body dumped from the top would roll all the way down without hanging up halfway in embarrassing fashion, which would be a very bad omen. I was glad to know that, if I started to roll, I wouldn’t become a bad omen.

  But the temple carvings were spectacular, once you got to the
top and recovered enough to appreciate them, carefully blocking from your mind the fact that you still had to get back down. We learned about the corbeled arch, which isn’t really an arch. We were shown scenes of bloody battle and bloodier sacrifice in a world tormented by strange demonic beasts ruled by the jaguar, Death. We came to understand a little about a tough, lusty, cruel fighting people who’d had intelligence enough to discover systems of mathematics and astronomy that were not to be surpassed for thousands of years, but who had left odd little gaps in their civilized knowledge.

  They had built some fine paved roads, but they’d never invented wheels to run on them—not even the later Mayas had made use of the wheel. They’d had shields and obsidian knives and stone-studded clubs and stone-tipped spears, but the atlatl, or throwing stick, was still to come, and that dreadful implement of long-range homicide, the bow, was not yet—as far as this part of the world was concerned—even a gleam in its inventor’s eyes. And intelligent as they were, they had never discovered a way, perhaps they’d never even discovered the desire, to escape from the total, absolute domination of their priests…

  It was well past noon when we all got together up where the great menacing two-headed stone jaguar at the top of the Great Pyramid looked both ways out of his open temple, scowling fiercely toward the Land of Morning and the Land of Night as if he didn’t like either very well. When she’d finished explaining the elaborate carvings on the temple façade and turned everybody loose to look around, Frances beckoned me to follow her.

  “Over here,” she said. “Let me show you something, Sam. Have you got a flashlight?”

  It was a dark alcove—in a Christian church it might have been called a small chapel. I dug a little flashlight out of my camera bag and turned it on. The mural leaped out at me from the stone wall opposite, faded of course, chipped here and there where the lime plaster had flaked away with the centuries, but magnificent and terrifying. It was Picasso’s Guernica set back in time and style a few millennia and done without the dying horse; but everything else in the picture was dying, priests and priestesses, armed and plumed warriors, richly dressed citizens, even a few children, all gasping their last in the Great Court below us, and on the ceremonial platforms before the three elevated temples, including the one in which we now stood, the Temple of Death.